


Gerbil Story

by Zinnith



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Crack, Gen, Pets, Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-10
Updated: 2011-03-10
Packaged: 2017-10-16 20:44:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/169155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zinnith/pseuds/Zinnith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danny has an unusual problem, Kono squees, Chin suffers and Steve secretly has a heart made of marshmallow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gerbil Story

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea how this happened. Unbeta'd, so feel free to tell me if you find any mistakes.

You hear stories about babies being abandoned on doorsteps, but Steve never actually expected to experience it in person. Only, this time it’s not just one baby but several, and they are being delivered rather than abandoned. The babies are about the size of Steve’s thumb and covered in soft, sand-coloured fur.

Chin comes into the office carrying a box, looking like it’s going to bite him. “Someone just dropped these off,” he says. “Who the hell ordered half a dozen baby rats?”

He looks half perplexed and half like he wants to wash his hands with steel wool and Steve wonders if he’d get away with taking a picture, because he can’t remember ever having seen Chin with that expression before.

“Aw, I’ve been trying to duck that for days!” Danny looks in the box and sighs. “Those are gerbils, okay, and they’re Gracie’s. Well, I guess they’re mine now.”

“Gerbils?” Kono dives for the box. “Oh, they’re adorable! I had tons of these when I was a kid, remember, Chin?”

Chin swallows and actually looks a little sick. He puts the box down on the table and wipes his hands on his pants legs. “I bet there’s a really good explanation for those,” he demands.

Kono fishes a gerbil out of the box and Steve peers over her shoulder to get a closer look at it. It’s incredibly cute, all tail and whiskers and black round eyes and it gives a little squeak and begins running through her fingers. Back in the box, five more of them are milling around, climbing all over each other. Steve wonders if he would get away with picking up one of his own or if he’s too manly to be seen cuddling furry little creatures.

“So, Grace has been talking about gerbils forever, all right?” Danny explains. “Not that she actually _needs_ any, what with the rabbit and the goldfish and the rest of the menagerie, but she has this look she likes to give me, right? And it’s not like I can give her a _pony_ like Stan-the-man, so I talked to Rachel, okay, because I learn from my mistakes and I’m not dumb enough to get my daughter another pet without clearing it with her first, and Rach says ‘okay, as long as it’s just a couple of them’.”

“Oh, you didn’t,” Kono says, looking up from the tiny little ball of fur she’s cradling in her hand.

Danny’s hands make a wide frustrated gesture. “The guy at the pet store swore it was two girl gerbils, all right? And Gracie adores them and I’m her favourite person in the world. But then they started breeding and now I’m not _Rachel’s_ favourite person in the world. She’s okay with two rodents, but she’s not okay with ten of them and since it’s technically my fault, I promised I’d take care of it, okay? Don’t give me that face, McGarrett, for I will punch you in the mouth, so help me God.”

Steve carefully schools his features. Not because he actually _had_ a face, he was just doing his best not to laugh at his partner in his time of plight, since Danny has so often lectured him about the insensitivity of doing such things and Steve is making an effort to prove that he too can learn.

“So, Kono? How d’you feel about revisiting your childhood memories? Be a gerbil mom again?” Danny gives her a pleading look and nods at the gerbil in Kono’s hand.

Kono shakes her head and puts the little thing back in the box with its siblings. “I live in a shoebox and I’m never home,” she says with a regretful little smile.

“All right.” Danny peeks inside and makes a face. “I guess it’s back to the pet store for these little guys.”

“Oh, no!” Kono looks horrified. “Don’t you know what they do with them if they can’t sell them?”

“No, I do not know that.” Danny sighs. “And judging by your tone, I don’t want to know, so please don’t tell me. Allow me to get rid of these things without any fuss, can you do that for me?”

“Snake food,” Chin says solemnly and then points to his cousin. “She cried for a week when she found out.”

“I was _six_.”

“You wanted to break into the store and rescue them,” Chin says and turns to the rest of the team. “She staked out the pet store for an entire afternoon, sat on the sidewalk and drew a map of exits and entrances and people who came and went. In crayon.”

Steve can’t help it. Halfway through the story, he’s bent over double, laughing so hard he can’t breathe. He can see it for his inner eye, six-year-old Kono sitting on the curb, glaring darkly at the object of her displeasure.

“Can’t you just tell Grace you sent them away to live on a farm?” Chin suggests, edging further and further away from the table and the box. There’s probably some very fine blackmail material here somewhere. Steve can’t wait for the right moment to ask Chin about the fear gene and its application to rodents.

Danny sighs. “No, that won’t work. My daughter is too smart to fall for that, okay? She’s going to want to know exactly what happened to them. Hell, she’ll probably want names and addresses and visitation rights. I cannot give my little girl’s babies away to get eaten, no matter how much I want to. Not that I actually _want_ to,” he quickly amends, when Kono gives him a look that could melt granite. “I guess I’m just going to have to find them good homes.”

Kalakauas never throw anything away so Kono digs around in her parents’ attic until she finds the cage she used to keep her gerbils in. They set it up on Danny’s desk, with the little water bottle and the little food bowl and the little bowl of sand for them to clean themselves in and it’s possible Steve spends half an hour in his garage, sanding down and drilling holes through a piece of wood to make them a toy but since no one saw him put it in the cage, there’s no evidence that it was actually him.

“I think it’s nice having them here,” Kono says, kneeling in front of the desk, resting her head on her forearms while she’s watching the gerbils run around and play and dig and gnaw on the plastic furniture in the cage. “Something to remind us it’s not all doom and gloom, you know?”

“Why can’t you just take the rats home?” Chin asks.

“Gerbils,” Danny corrects and then studies the cage with an expression of alarm. “Oops, weren’t there six of them in here a minute ago?”

Chin barricades himself in Steve’s office and refuses to come out, even after the missing gerbil has been located, hiding inside the wooden toy Steve may or may not have made.

Danny spends a week terrorising the HPD, cornering every cop he knows who has children and trying to convince them to take in a couple of innocent baby gerbils to save them from a horrible fate. Steve trails along, mostly so he can covertly film the whole thing with his camera phone to keep for posterity. It takes them ten days before Officer Palakiko and Detective Kim agree to take a couple each for their kids, but after that, they’re out of luck. Two gerbils are still left.

“Team mascots?” Kono asks hopefully.

Steve’s not completely opposed to the idea. The little critters have grown on him and he remembers the hamster he wanted when he was eight and never got. “Why not?” he says.

“Because the cleaners will hate us even more than they already do?” Danny says, giving the cage a calculating look. Yesterday, he and Steve had a couple of beers after work and named the remaining gerbils McClane and Dirty Harry. They haven’t told Chin and Kono about it yet, but it felt wrong to just refer to them as ‘the gerbils’. (Or in Chin’s case - ‘the pests’.)

“No,” Chin says. “Absolutely not. No rats in the office.”

“ _Gerbils_ , Chin,” Danny says, for what is probably the hundredth time. “They’re _gerbils_ , not rats, there’s a big difference.”

“It’s the tails,” Steve adds helpfully. “Rats have naked tails, gerbils don’t.” Okay, so maybe he read up a little bit. So sue him. He was just trying to help his partner out.

“ _Don’t talk about their tails_ ,” Chin hisses and he’s getting that look in his face like he’s considering going for his shotgun and Steve figures it would be the wrong time for more trivia from the animal kingdom. See? He _can_ learn.

The next day, Chin shows up in the office in the company of a dark-haired boy about the age of ten. “This is Jake,” he introduces the kid. “He’s Malia’s nephew and he’d love to take care of the ra... the gerbils.”

Kono’s face falls a little. She already went and bought them a little gerbil house and she brings fresh fruit and vegetables for them every day. Steve does his best not to be disappointed. The Five-0 headquarters really isn’t a place to keep pets anyway, and Danny’s right, the cleaners have been complaining a bit.

“Well, that’s that, finally,” Danny says after they’ve all said goodbye to McClane and Dirty Harry. Jake promised to let them keep their names and he gave Danny his phone number and address so Grace can come and visit them. Steve is already trying to come up with excuses to tag along.

“You know a female gerbil can have a litter every other month, right?” Kono says.

Chin buries his head in his arms and groans. “Do this to me again, and I will demand hazard pay!”

It's a lot more quiet in the office after that and it feels a bit empty. At least the shrieks when Chin finds the plastic rat Kono hid in his desk drawer help liven up the place a little.

-fin-


End file.
